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en-usTechdirt. Stories about "ipi"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:52:00 PDTThe USPTO's Reality Distortion Field: Web Filter Blocks Critics Like EFF, Welcomes Maximalist LobbyistsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120918/12131620417/usptos-reality-distortion-field-web-filter-blocks-critics-like-eff-welcomes-maximalist-lobbyists.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120918/12131620417/usptos-reality-distortion-field-web-filter-blocks-critics-like-eff-welcomes-maximalist-lobbyists.shtmlUpdated: At 5pm ET, the USPTO called Jamie to say that a contractor had set this up, and after reviewing their policies, they had stopped blocking such sites...

Well this is bizarre. Jamie Love from KEI was over at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a meeting about "global negotiations on intellectual property and access to medicine." The meeting itself was held in a room that it uses for the USPTO's Global Intellectual Property Academy (GIPA), and there is free WiFi for people to use. Love tried to log onto his own website... and found that it was being blocked as a "political/activist group."

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)

Your request was denied because this URL contains content that is categorized as: "Political/Activist Groups" which is blocked by USPTO policy. If you believe the categorization is inaccurate, please contact the USPTO Service Desk and request a manual review of the URL.

For assistance, contact USPTO OCIO IT Service Desk. (io-proxy4)

Love then checked a bunch of other sites... and noticed a rather distressing pattern. For public interest groups who advocate that the existing copyright/patent system is broken, the websites were all blocked. ACLU, EFF, Public Knowledge, Public Citizen, CDT... all blocked. However, if you're a lobbyist for maximalism? No problem! MPAA, RIAA, IIPA, IPI, PHRMA, BSA... come on through. They do allow Creative Commons. Thankfully (for us, at least), they don't seem to block blogs that talk about this stuff. Techdirt is allowed, as are things like BoingBoing, Groklaw and Larry Lessig and Michael Geist's blogs. Though, oddly, a bunch of political sites (DailyKos, TPM, RedState, Rush Limgaugh's site) are blocked.

It may be an "over active" filter -- but it does seem particularly disturbing that all those groups who fight for the public's rights on the very issues the USPTO is dealing with on a regular basis have their sites completely blocked.

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]]>but techdirt's availablehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120918/12131620417Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:33:18 PDTIf ACTA Is So Great, Where Are All The Supporters Extolling Its Virtues?Glyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120320/08514918172/if-acta-is-so-great-where-are-all-supporters-extolling-its-virtues.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120320/08514918172/if-acta-is-so-great-where-are-all-supporters-extolling-its-virtues.shtmlOne of the striking features of the ACTA debate is the deafening silence from those who are in favor of it. Maybe that's down to the SOPA effect: companies and organizations are frightened of being associated with such an unpopular idea. Of course, it could just be that even its most fervent supporters can't really come up with any plausible justifications for it. That's certainly the impression you get reading a rare attempt to raise the ACTA flag from the Institute for Policy Innovation, entitled "Acting Out on ACTA."

It begins by focussing on potentially lethal counterfeits -- fake drugs, fake brake linings and fake circuit breaker boxes. That conveniently ignores the fact that no one is against cracking down on such dangerous counterfeits, and that the main problems with ACTA concern its attempt to apply the same rules to digital infringement, where there are no safety issues to justify its harsh and disproportionate measures.

But leaving that aside, ACTA doesn't actually tackle the problem of physical counterfeits, for reasons I've discussed before -- the main one being that the nations where fakes tend to originate are not signatories to ACTA, and so won't be bound by it. As for the countries that have signed up, the principal ones like the 27 European Union nations, Japan and the US already have stringent laws that enable counterfeits to be tackled, so ACTA won't make any difference for them either. The only countries where ACTA might have some effect are places like Mexico, and sadly the issue there is not so much fake drugs coming into America as the problems caused by real ones.

Rather than offer any more reasons why ACTA is a good thing, the IPI article then changes direction, and begins a bizarre attack on widespread concerns about ACTA's lack of transparency:

[Anti-IP activists] complain that ACTA was "negotiated in secret," and protest that critics did not have access to negotiators. Rather than making substantive arguments against the actual text of the agreement, they attempt to kill it by condemning the process.

In fact, plenty of "substantive arguments" against ACTA have been provided, for example here, here and here, as well as these on Techdirt.
The IPI article goes on:

it’s disingenuous to argue that agreements between governments must be negotiated in public with opposition activists in the room, and it’s naïve for elected officials to fall for that argument. That’s not transparency—that’s paralysis. Treaties, defense compacts, and trade agreements have always been negotiated confidentially between governments.

But no one has argued that activists must be in the room. Instead, people simply want access to draft versions of the treaty as they are negotiated, plus the ability to make their views known to their representatives. That does not mean people are demanding the right to do that in the negotiating room itself -- that's plainly absurd -- just a mechanism for providing feedback, perhaps by means of the Internet.

As to the point that treaties have "always been negotiated confidentially between governments", that's also not the case, as this article explains:

Ars Technica recently talked to Michael Geist, a legal scholar at the University of Ottawa, about this effort [to export restrictive American copyright laws abroad]. He told us that rather than making their arguments at the World Intellectual Property Organization, where they would be subject to serious public scrutiny, the US and other supporters of more restrictive copyright law have increasingly focused on pushing their agenda in alternative venues, such as pending trade deals, where negotiations are secret and critics are excluded.

So, far from being the norm, ACTA's secrecy is a conscious attempt to avoid the scrutiny and consensual approach that characterizes WIPO, the traditional forum for multilateral agreements in this area.

The IPI article concludes:

ACTA should be judged on its merits, not on some false illegitimate-process charge created by opposition activists. And its merits are many.

It's strange that an article that claims there are "many" merits of ACTA fails to mention them, and concentrates instead on attacking straw-men. But there's something stranger still. According to the IPI's donations:

IPI is studiously non-partisan, but we have a definite philosophical opposition to Big Government solutions that are almost always worse than the problem. Today, the threat from Big Government is greater than ever, and our work is more important than ever.

ACTA is the ultimate in Big Government solutions -- in fact, it's even bigger than Big Government, because it's a supranational treaty that imposes an extra layer of obligations and bureacracy on governments, and hence their populations. So the key question is not: Why can't the IPI tell us what those "many" merits of ACTA are? but: Why is it supporting it at all?

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]]>still-waitinghttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120320/08514918172Wed, 4 Jan 2012 11:04:00 PSTCato Institute Digs Into MPAA's Own Research To Show That SOPA Wouldn't Save A Single Net JobMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/04545217274/cato-institute-digs-into-mpaas-own-research-to-show-that-sopa-wouldnt-save-single-net-job.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/04545217274/cato-institute-digs-into-mpaas-own-research-to-show-that-sopa-wouldnt-save-single-net-job.shtmlthorough debunking of the stats used by the US Chamber of Commerce to support both bills, as well as highlighted the misleading-to-bogus stats used by Lamar Smith in his support of the bill.

First off, the $58 billion comes from an absolutely laughable report for the Institute for Policy Innovation, done every year by Stephen Siwek at a firm called Economists Incorporated. We've challenged this ridiculous number in the past, but not to the level of detail that Sanchez has here. He starts out by bringing up (as we have many times), Tim Lee's excellent debunking of the ridiculous "ripple effects" that Siwek/IPI always use, despite them being a trick to double, triple, quadruple, etc count the same dollars:

In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefitted by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

It turns out that the $58 billion comes from this process, making use of a dubious multiplier on a different MPAA report that claimed merely $6.1 billion in losses for the US movie industry, multiplied to about $20 billion -- as the portion of the "losses" that come from movies. But, as Sanchez notes, that number itself is highly questionable:

Okay, but even if we assume that $6.1 billion is accurate, Sanchez explains how that's not even what's at stake with SOPA, since the $6.1 billion is a global number:

Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.

Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million--which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

Okay. So now we're down from $58 billion to... $446 million. That's less than 1% of the original number. But, still, you might say, $446 million is a fair chunk of change (and the $58 billion doesn't just include movies, but other content, like music and software). So perhaps something like SOPA still makes sense to protect a few jobs? Nope. Again, Sanchez points out how this ignores reality:

As one expert consulted by GAO put it, “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.” In many cases--I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music--a U.S. consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing. In the other 20 percent of cases, the result is a loss to the content industry, but not a let loss to the economy, since the money just ends up being spent elsewhere. If you’re concerned about the overall jobs picture, as opposed to the fortunes of a specific industry, there is no good reason to think eliminating piracy by U.S. users would yield any jobs on net, though it might help boost employment in copyright-intensive sectors.

In other words, we're right back where we started. The whole thing is based on the bogus assumption that money not spent on movies (which, again, have been making a ton of money lately) somehow disappears from the economy. But that's simply not true. So, really, why is it that anyone in the press, or in elected office, is allowed to quote that bogus $58 billion number without it being challenged?

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]]>let's dig in...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120104/04545217274Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:50:16 PDTMPAA: Bad At Math & Bad At EconomicsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110909/02541415865/mpaa-bad-math-bad-economics.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110909/02541415865/mpaa-bad-math-bad-economics.shtmlbuying 200 more DVDs per year. The MPAA folks were apparently not happy that people called them on their misleading stats, and have come out with a statement, which it claims is about "correcting the record."

If only that were true. Instead, we get more misleading bunk from the Masters of Propaganda.

First off, the MPAA admits that perhaps (just perhaps) their original graphic may have been a little misleading, and have put out a new version that moves away from implying that they were losing $58 billion, and now merely suggests that it's the US economy that loses this much money from the combined infringement on movies, music, packaged software and video games. This is complete and utter bunk -- and the MPAA folks either know this and are lying... or they're idiots. Take your pick.

The $58 billion claim comes from a study from The Institute for Policy Innovation that has been debunked so many times over, the fact that the MPAA would even bring it up is a laugh. And it's based on a very questionable analysis of the broadly defined "copyright industry." Of course, as we've noted in the past, the definition of "the copyright industry" for such studies includes all sorts of goods and services that do not rely on copyright at all, but are force-lumped into this study. So, if we're talking about actual products that rely on copyright, you probably have to ratchet down the scale by an order of magnitude. And that's just to start. From there, you have to realize that IPI's numbers use completely bogus math.

Tim Lee did an excellent job explaining the economic and mathematical fallacies of their methodology years ago (for which IPI kindly tried to get him fired from his job). The key issue is how the IPI counts "losses."

In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefitted by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

Furthermore, in IPI and MPAA fantasy-land, dollars not spent on movies simply disappear from the economy. And yet, anyone can tell you that's simply not true. That money continues to be spent elsewhere, and plenty of studies have shown that, despite growing infringement online, the amount of money that individuals spend on entertainment continues to rise.

So why would the MPAA rely on this number, which is so obviously false? Because it doesn't care about the truth or accuracy or "correcting the record." The MPAA's job is to get Congress to pass laws that divert money from what the market wants to its legacy studios who are slow to adapt. So it will use any number it can get its hands on, no matter how ridiculous. It's just that this time it got called on it, so it had to scramble to try to make the number look even a little bit legit...

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]]>sighhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110909/02541415865Wed, 3 Oct 2007 12:27:00 PDTMedia Uncritically Cites Flawed Piracy Studies, AgainTimothy Leehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071003/101456.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071003/101456.shtmlWashington Post has a story about the never-ending lobbying campaign for more draconian penalties for copyright infringement. It's extremely one-sided, quoting several industry executives but not a single person on the other side of the copyright debate, who could have pointed out that Congress has passed "tougher penalties" repeatedly in recent years and the results haven't exactly been good. The report also cites the widely discredited series of piracy reports that, as I explained here and here, dramatically overstate the effects of piracy on the copyright holders by double- and triple-counting uncaptured revenues by adding in "ripple effects."

Those previous studies covered the movie and music industries, and both made the same basic error: after they counted some amount of CDs or movie tickets unsold as "lost revenue," they then counted the same lost revenue again by calculating how much less the movie and music industry is paying their suppliers due to those lower revenues. In some cases, they count the same dollar a third or fourth time when those suppliers pay their suppliers less than they would have without piracy. But that's obviously silly. What matters is the total number of dollars earned, not how many times each dollar changes hands. When you strip out these spurious double- and triple-counted revenues, and correct some of the other questionable assumptions I detail in the posts linked to above, you find out that uncaptured revenues from music piracy to the recording industry are around $3.2 billion, not $12.5 billion as the report claims. Similarly, IPI claims the uncaptured revenue for the movie industry is $20.5 billion, but if you strip out the double-counting, you find it's more like $6.1 billion. I pointed these problems out to them after they released the movie study, yet they still made the same flawed assumptions for the music study, and presumably their latest study has the same problems. The Post says the latest study finds that the combined cost of movie, music, and software piracy is $58 billion. I think it's a safe bet that this number, too, is wildly overstated, and that the actual figure is closer to $15 billion. Unfortunately, this reporter apparently didn't have the time to dig into the report in detail, or to pick up the phone and call someone who could offer a critical perspective. Once again, readers will see these inflated numbers reported as fact and assume there must be some rigorous methodology behind it.